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Posts tagged ‘CRT’

Minnesota Will Soon Make Teachers Endorse Child Mutilation to Get a License

BY: RYAN MACPHERSON | JANUARY 10, 2023

Minnesota teacher with a lesbian sign — **To be state licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must personally advocate critical race theory and transgender ideology.**

RYAN MACPHERSON

The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.

A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).

The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.

Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.

The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.

The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.

Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.

A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”

It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.

The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”

Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”

Back in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, conservative watchdogs encouraged citizens to participate in open forums and public hearings, which fomented large protests against the licensure revisions, to no avail. The ever-active Child Protection League, the stalwart Center of the American Experiment, and a 2021 start-up called the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism sounded the alarm.

But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.

The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.

If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.

A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.

Ryan C. MacPherson, Ph.D., is a Minnesotan and author of “Rediscovering the American Republic: A People’s Quest for Ordered Liberty.”

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Youngkin’s Crusade To Get Radical Gender Theory Out Of Virginia Schools Puts Kids And Families First

BY: CASEY CHALK | SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

Author Casey Chalk profile

CASEY CHALK

Last week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin further delivered on his gubernatorial campaign promise to give parents more control over their children’s education. The Virginia Department of Education issued new model policies specifically directed at resisting the radical gender ideology that has become commonplace even in the Commonwealth’s elementary schools.

The New Model Policies

Virginia’s new model policies explicitly state that students’ participation in school programming and use of school facilities such as bathrooms or locker rooms should be based on their biological sex and that modifications should be offered only to the extent required under federal law. They also assert that students who are minors must be referred to by the name and pronouns in their official records unless there is explicit parental approval for the use of something else. And they also declare that schools may not conceal information about a student’s so-called gender identity from his or her parents and that parents must be given the opportunity to object before any gender-related counseling services are offered.

The document reads: “Parents have the right to instill in and nurture values and beliefs for their own children and make decisions concerning their children’s education and upbringing in accordance with their customs, faith, and family culture.” In a rebuke to those officials and administrators who have encouraged wrongly named gender-affirming “care,” it explains: “Parents are in the best position to work with their children and, where appropriate, their children’s health care providers.”

The new model policies are subject to a 30-day period for public comment that begins later this month. Following that period, in accordance with a 2020 state law, school boards across the Old Dominion must adopt policies that are “consistent with” those of the state’s Department of Education. Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, noted that the updated guidance “delivers on the governor’s commitment to preserving parental rights and upholding the dignity and respect of all public school students.”

A Personal Anecdote

I can personally speak to how widespread the promotion of gender ideology has become, at least in Fairfax County, where I attended school for 12 years and then worked as a high-school history teacher. The very day after Virginia’s Department of Education issued this new guidance, my family attended a picnic in our neighborhood. My two eldest children (ages 9 and 7) were playing a game with other neighborhood kids, including, a bit awkwardly, a teenage girl who attends the local public high school. During the game, and when my wife and I were not nearby to overhear, this teenager told my children that she identifies as both a girl and a boy and that there are “72 genders.”

My wife and I homeschool our children. It wasn’t something I was eager to do — my extended family has been attending county public schools since the 1960s, and I was proud of my experience in FCPS 20 years ago. But I knew things had changed very dramatically in the last two decades, and I wanted to shield my children from ideas and behaviors that are not commensurate with their maturity. Simply put, prepubescent children don’t need seminars in gender fluidity and sexual experimentation. But over this past weekend, an FCPS-educated teenager took it upon herself to impart those ideas to my children.

As confusing as this was for my children — and as upsetting as it was to my wife and me — I do not level much blame at this teenager for taking away part of their innocence and forcing us to have conversations with our children about gender and sex we had been hoping to delay just a few more years. I blame FCPS teachers and administrators who welcomed this gender ideology in schools. And I blame smartphones and social media for proliferating these ideas with little parental oversight.

Protecting Our Children

Left-wing corporate media and Democratic politicians, of course, have been quick to attack Youngkin over his new policy. “Virginia has moved to restrict the rights of trans students in its public schools,” reads a mid-September headline from NPR. The Department of Education’s guidance “calls for the misgendering and outing of children in schools where they’re supposed to be safe. Absolutely shameful,” tweeted Virginia Democratic Del. Mike Mullin.

Think about the fact that in my kids’ very first interaction with a public school-educated teenager, she couldn’t help but share the confused, biologically inaccurate gender ideology she has been wrongly told is the most important part of her identity. That speaks to the pervasive nature and aggressiveness of this ideology and its adherents. Think about how many kids have had their lives thrown into chaos by adults who tell them they may be a boy in a girl’s body, “gender fluid,” or some other nonsense that may very well cause them permanent physical and emotional damage.

Thankfully, our kids trust their parents enough and have a solid enough understanding of what makes boys different from girls that we could have a brief, open, and hopefully instructive conversation about what they experienced on a neighborhood playground. Youngkin’s edict aims to ensure those conversations happen in the home, guided by loving parents, and less influenced by the confused ideology of bureaucrats who don’t have your children’s best interests at heart.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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The Public Education Swamp Refuses to Learn Anything from A Year of Embarrassing Failures

REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Instead of welcoming self-reflection and accountability, the educational establishment and its media allies are trying to gaslight parents.

ROBERT BUSEK

The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.

This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.

Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.

A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”

In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”

Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the

organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.

The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen “to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”

Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.

This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.

On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.

After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:

Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.

The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.

Institutional Suicide

In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.

The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.

As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F Branco Cartoon – Deplorable

A.F. BRANCO | on May 9, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-deplorable/

Biden says MAGA is the most extreme group in recent American history ignoring Antifa and BLM riots.

MAGA the Most Extreme — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Democrats’ Culture War is Destroying Their Ability to Govern Competently Enough to Fool Voters

REPORTED BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | APRIL 25, 2022

The ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.

Author Nathanael Blake profile

NATHANAEL BLAKE

New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently claimed to be “truly shocked” by a poll showing President Biden with a 33 percent approval rating. I was shocked, too — how could his approval rating be that high?

Blow, of course, is surprised at Biden’s unpopularity, and worried that the Democrats are stumbling into a bloodbath in the November midterms. Blow is paid to understand and explain politics and culture to his readers. That he is surprised reveals a lot about the bubble he is in. And his meandering analysis of Democrats’ problems illustrates how the ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.

Blow initially blames Biden — for being too much of a “decent man … sober and straightforward” rather than a “showman.” This is a ludicrous assessment of a politician, who, until age caught up with his tongue, was one of D.C.’s preeminent bloviators. Nonetheless, Blow’s ordinary partisan delusion is less interesting than the ideological blind spots revealed when he turns to genuine sources of Biden’s unpopularity, such as “the fear of crime and the pinch of inflation” and that “Republicans are playing heavily into culture war issues.”

Class and Culture Wars Merge

Although Blow does not seem to realize it, these issues combine to reinforce voters’ disapproval of Biden. Democratic failures on bread and butter issues such as crime and inflation are related to the culture-war radicalism that has captured their party. Twitter, not the blue-collar union hall, is now the heart of the Democratic Party, which is controlled by the educated, urban professional-managerial class, epitomized by woke, union-busting CEOs. This faction has merged the class and culture wars — championing cultural radicalism, entrenching its own economic interests, and neglecting the common good.

The Democrats are the party of wealthy diversity consultants lecturing hourly workers about white privilege and cis-heteropatriarchy while inflation eats away at wages and investment firms buy up homes in the hope of making America a nation of permanent renters. The governing priorities of those running the Democratic Party are sending government money to their clients (from teachers unions to Planned Parenthood) and waging culture war.

Dems Are Fanatical Culture Warriors

And they are fanatical culture warriors. Consider Blow’s complaint that the GOP is “challenging the teaching of Black history and the history of white supremacy in schools, as well as restricting discussions of L.G.B.T. issues and campaigning against trans women and girls competing in sports with other women and girls.” He adds that “Republicans are using white parental fear, particularly the fears of white moms.”

This litany of whines highlights the bubble Blow and his audience at The New York Times are in. Ordinary Americans know the difference between teaching history and teaching poisonous ideology derived from critical race theory. Americans understand that it is unjust for males to compete in women’s sports, and that it is perverse to teach young children about sex and gender ideology. They are angry when educators encourage children to transition, and outraged when they hide it from parents.

Voters have also noticed that the cultural left never stops where it says it will. We were assured that the LGBT movement was about tolerance for consenting adult relationships; now it is about transgender toddlers, child drag queens, and men in girls’ locker rooms. We are also now told that being anti-racist somehow means judging people based on the color of their skin. Blow and other bubbled liberals may be okay with mastectomies for confused teenage girls, but most Americans are not.

This cultural radicalism erodes Democrats’ ability to govern competently. Sometimes this is the result of neglecting the basic tasks of government in order to prioritize boutique cultural issues, other times it is a direct consequence of ideology, as exemplified in the crime wave resulting from woke prosecutors and defunding the police.

Cushioned from Consequences

In either case, wokeness is an ideology for those who are cushioned from its consequences. Indeed, wokeness is primarily a phenomenon of the college-educated, and especially the well-off; it is a niche, luxury political philosophy that thrives among the privileged and in the shelter of academia.

But though it is often a political liability, there are ways it serves the interests of its adherents. In particular, woke ideology legitimates the rule of the woke over the non-woke, and justifies economic exploitation and socio-political repression. Wokeness claims to reveal the systems of unjust oppression that permeate society; it focuses on race, sex, and gender, and relegates economic class to a second-tier concern. This allows many of the privileged and powerful to claim to be righteous allies of the oppressed without having to sacrifice economic or social power or position. Indeed, many can claim to be oppressed themselves. This is why wokeness tends to focus on BIPoC and LGBT representation in boardrooms and Ivy League campuses, rather than helping the working class.

The Wicked Working Class

Thus, it is to be expected that woke discourse often suggests that the working class (especially working-class whites) have it coming for their sins of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on — the wicked deserve punishment, not sympathy. This is why pundits such as Blow are so quick to accuse dissenters of racism and bigotry. And it is why the woke left supports oligarchic power in pursuit of its aims, and eagerly uses economic, technological, and cultural power to suppress dissent.

This is why professors are having to submit woke loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements, and why mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training has become the norm in the corporate world. This is why the left is eager to use social media censorship to suppress “misinformation” — which in many cases is truth that is inconvenient to the regime (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop story).

It is also why the left cannot understand its own failures. They have isolated themselves in a bubble that has drifted so far from reality and the concerns of normal voters that even electoral disaster may not bring them back to Earth. Cocooned in privilege and ideology, they think Biden is doing just fine. But most Americans have had enough of a government that is more committed to transitioning children than to controlling crime and inflation.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Mike Rowe rails on Canadian officials for turning on truckers: They went from ‘hero to villain’ in the ‘course of 2 weeks’

Reported by PHIL SHIVER | February 22, 2022

Mike Rowe on Tuesday criticized Canadian government officials for their response to Freedom Convoy truckers amid a national protest over COVID-19 vaccine mandates. For weeks, thousands of demonstrators have camped in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, and blocked border crossings with the U.S. in protest of the mandate and other coronavirus restrictions placed on truckers crossing the border.

In response to what the Canadian government deemed an “unlawful assembly,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, a measure that grants authorities sweeping power to restrict travel, disperse crowds, arrest demonstrators, and freeze their bank accounts, among other actions considered necessary to stop assembly. Over the weekend, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson even suggested selling off dozens of vehicles seized during the Freedom Convoy protests to cover the city’s costs incurred during the demonstrations.

During an interview with BlazeTV host Glenn Beck on Tuesday, Rowe pointed out how quickly the situation has changed now that some truckers find themselves on the bad end of state directives. Truckers, once considered essential to the economy during the pandemic, have in short order become enemies of the state, the “Dirty Jobs” star suggested.

As Canadian officials debate auctioning off the Freedom Convoy protesters' trucks, @mikeroweworks gives me his take: "Truckers were the very definition of essentiality. Within the course of 2 weeks, they literally went from heroes to villains." pic.twitter.com/zV3bEJOspI
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) February 22, 2022

“You know what strikes me about all of this?” Rowe asked, adding, “And maybe this is somewhat of a silver lining [because] I kind of feel like we’re about to close the loop.”

“When this started, truckers were right on the leading edge of heroes. They were the very definition of essentiality,” he said. “[But] in the course of two weeks, they literally went from hero to villain.”

That’s how fast things can change in today’s chaotic socio-political climate.

Beck noted that protesters have yet to be convicted of crimes or even appear in court. Nevertheless, the government is floating an auctioning off of property. The Canadian government responded quickly and harshly to continued protests in Ottawa over the weekend.

Police descended on the crowds, arresting at least 191 protesters and towing at least 76 vehicles since Friday. In one scene caught on video, police are seen charging on horseback into a crowd of demonstrators and knocking down at least two people, including an elderly woman on a mobility scooter.

One trucker recounted to Fox News host Tucker Carlson the moment that police repeatedly struck him while he was on the ground, complying to orders.

“They drag me in, they lie me down on my belly, and I don’t — I don’t recall how many were on top of me … I felt like I was beaten, but I took it like a man,” the trucker recalled.
“They broke my body a little bit, but not my spirit,” he added.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fowl Play

A.F. BRANCO | on February 17, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-fowl-play/

Democrat Chickens are coming home to roost like Defund Police, Crime, Inflation, CRT, Russia Collusion.

Democrat Chickens Coming Home — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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Will A ‘Parental Bill Of Rights’ Finally Enforce Government School Transparency?

Reported BY: RICH CROMWELL | FEBRUARY 10, 2022

mom holding kid's hand walking into school

The response to Covid-19 has accelerated a growing divide between parents and schools, which is mostly to say between parents and teachers’ unions. From denying students the ability to learn in-person to forced masking to teaching divisive, historically inaccurate curriculum based on critical race theory (CRT), the trend has been to sideline parents from their children’s educations.

In response to this, states are taking action to ensure parents remain the primary decision-makers for their kids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ bill of rights in June 2021. Missouri is considering a similar proposal and in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued 11 executive orders on his first day in office, two of which were related to education. Indiana is considering a parents’ bill of rights as part of a push to banish despicable materials that kids shouldn’t be taught.

At the national level, Sen. Josh Hawley has also proposed a Parents’ Bill of Rights, although so far it has not gained any traction. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now president of Young America’s Foundation, declared “2022 is the Year of the Parent.” In other words, there’s a growing appetite among parents to take a more active role in education, whether through supporting legislation to empower them or taking the initiative to join their local school boards.

On Thursday, January 20, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added Texas to the list of states attempting to tackle the divide when he announced his own Parental Bill of Rights, which will be voted on and perhaps enshrined into Texas’ constitution in January 2023. The initiative consists of seven points clarifying the fact that parents, not school boards or unions, are in charge of their kids’ educations.

In announcing the proposal, Abbott said, “The role of parents is being diminished by government itself across the U.S. Parents are losing a voice when it comes to their children’s education and health matters. Many parents feel powerless to do anything about it. That must end … Under the Parental Bill of Rights, we will amend the Texas Constitution to reinforce that parents are the main decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”

A key point in Texas’ proposed amendment, which could serve as a model starting point for other states reads, “Expand parents’ rights to access course curriculum and all material that is available in any education setting for their student through online posting and other methods so parents know what topics will be taught.” While Texas parents can currently get those materials, it requires an information request rather than the click of a mouse.

Submitting an information request is an unnecessary burden, particularly in an age in which schools are teaching children to be racists, encouraging them to be climate change alarmists, and pushing ludicrous and dangerous ideas about changing your sex or being “two-spirit.” Granted, two of those occurrences are from California, a state parents should just move away from rather than attempt to reform.

Even in Texas, though, there are leftist salvos in the culture war. Just last October, a mom in Keller, who with her husband had moved their family from California to avoid such things, discovered their new town’s library was offering a book featuring graphic depictions of oral sex. Parents in Leander, a town north of Austin and part of its greater metropolitan area, also discovered books with depictions and illustrations they don’t want their children to have access to without their permission.

While all these initiatives are worthy ideas, and Abbott’s proposal is the strongest yet, the jury is still out on whether they will resolve the issues parents are seeing with schools.

For starters, parental bills of rights require parents to actually be involved, which doesn’t always happen, even in the age of Zoom schooling. As a result, these various bills, amendments, and executive orders could result in nothing more than “won’t somebody please think of the children” activity. As the great men’s basketball coach, known for also educating his players, John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”

Elected officials such as Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin may be leading the nation on this front, but they’re doing so in response to their constituents. Youngkin’s victory was likely sealed, in fact, when his opponent Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Given that Youngkin’s implicit message is “Stop messing with our kids, you freaks!,” the tide on parents shipping their kids off to school and hoping for the best seems to be turning.

Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, an activity that doesn’t lead to achievement, but our kids’ educations are not the government’s job. But at least for those of us who do send our kids to government-run or -funded schools, such measures offer us a way to take more charge and ensure that we approve of what’s being taught in the classroom and offer recourse for times when we have legitimate criticisms.

The work is still up to us parents, but governors and legislatures can give us the tools we need to do that work more effectively.

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California School District Tells Kids: ‘Attacking Whiteness Is Not Enough’

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | FEBRUARY 02, 2022

A now-deleted portion of the Riverside, Califonia school district’s website obtained by The Federalist displays that the district promoted an essay that attacks people based on their inborn skin color. The essay, titled “Decentering Whiteness” by Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, claimed that “attacking whiteness is not enough.” It sought to divide people on the basis of their race and argued that “whiteness” should be pushed to “the margin,”

Riverside Unified School District promoted the essay at least three separate times, under the “Professional Learning,” “Community Engagement,” and “Culture and Climate” sections of their Equity, Access, and Community Engagement resources page, according to screenshots.

The Federalist previously revealed that both Riverside Superintendent Renee Hill and Board of Education member Tom Hunt lied about the district teaching critical race theory. One parent from the district, who wished to remain unnamed, told The Federalist that the resources list that contained “Decentering Whiteness” was removed from the website following the exposé of the district’s dishonesty.

When asked why the resources had been removed, Communication Director Diana Meza stated that the district is “updating the Equity, Access & Community Engagement google site and landing page, the page should be back up soon.”

The school district has charge of nearly 40,000 students, according to federal data, and 35 percent of those students are white. School families’ median income is significantly above the national average, at approximately $73,000 per year.

Decentering Whiteness

The removed 19-page “resources” document, which can be viewed here, not only condemned “whiteness” but served as a guidebook for how institutions can fight it, so that “whiteness itself can be made more marginal.” The paper explained, “Decentering whiteness, as we envision it, is a collective process that can take place in organizations, sectors of society, personal lives, etc., over periods of days, months, years and generations.”

While launching into both anti-white attacks and blatant attempts to divide people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, the paper engaged in race essentialism. It cast race as a defining rather than incidental characteristic when it tells readers to “Assume whiteness, and race, always structures our experience, and thus needs to be consciously considered as part of any social process.”

White people are also openly villainized in the materials. One line reads, “white culture has, on balance, been based on principles of conquest and exploitation” while another says that in the attempt to marginalize whiteness, “simply attacking whiteness is not enough.”

The document did not oppose attacking “whiteness” out of an opposition to racism, nor did it express any concern over the potential fallout of seizing on racial fault lines for socio-political ends. Rather, it simply argued that openly attacking whiteness wouldn’t be strategically effective. It remarked “Simply attacking whiteness is not enough to accomplish this goal. Assaults on whiteness, depending on their nature, may have the effect of confirming and solidifying the central position of whiteness in American society.”

Lighter skin color has been and continues to be one of the prime targets of critical race theory. Noel Ignatiev, a Marxist Harvard professor who is cited in “Decentering Whiteness,” infamously claimed that “treasonous to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

He also remarked, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”

Perhaps most sinister, “Decentering Whiteness” clearly sought to encourage racial division and even racial conflict, calling on a multiracial coalition to “displace” whiteness. It read “It will take a multiracial effort to displace whiteness, one that includes people from all racial/cultural groups.”

How exactly any of this rhetoric benefits the students or staff at Riverside Unified School District is entirely unclear. The presence of this material in a school climate is in fact both un-American and undeniably harmful, not only to the white people who are maligned by it but also those of all other racial backgrounds whom the article attempts to conscript into a race-based power struggle.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com. SPENCER LINDQUISTVISIT ON TWITTER@SPENCERLNDQST

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Dallas Private School Lies to Parents About Teaching Students Racism

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 27, 2022

Amid ongoing supervision from parents across America, the Episcopal School of Dallas has sought to reassure parents it is not teaching critical race theory or targeting students on the basis of their race. Despite this attempt, documents obtained by The Federalist prove that the institution is teaching critical race theory while telling parents it’s not.

The elite private school, which bears a whopping tuition price of $26,945 for kindergarteners and $34,075 for high school seniors, sought to insulate itself from backlash on its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page, which preemptively responds to common critiques. The page warns against “misinformation” before assuring parents the school is “not teaching critical race theory,” nor is it teaching “that being part of an ethnic or racial group makes a person responsible for systemic problems, or to cast blame on or shame any member of the community for actions that took place in history.” According to other school documents, however, these claims are false.

Student assignments show the school is teaching the left-wing extremism that targets children in so many government-run K-12 schools.

CRT In The Classroom

One Episcopal School of Dallas reading assignment for a middle school history class titled “This Thing Called White” exhibited the defining characteristics of CRT. The assignment claimed that “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.” It goes on to contend that race was created “with the purpose of giving power to white people.”

In an 8th grade history class taught by Ron Frankland, students were required to listen to a podcast from the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Frankland also signaled his support for CRT while bemoaning the wave of pushback from parents who’ve voiced their opposition to the ideology.

Nevertheless, attempts to turn students into leftwing activists through indoctrination appear to be working. An open letter titled “Our Turn To Rise Up,” penned by students as part of a history assignment at the school, condemned America as “diseased” and endeavored to “spark a fire of revolution.”

Faculty Members Endorse CRT

Furthermore, several faculty members, including many who are in key positions, have demonstrated an allegiance to the doctrines of CRT, as well as expressed their intent to incorporate the divisive theory in the classroom.

Jennifer Jarnagin is the chair of the school’s Classical and Modern Languages Department, as well as a sponsor of the Middle School Diversity Club and a middle and upper school Latin teacher. Several of Jarnagin’s tweets display an anti-cop and anti-white bias informed by the teachings of critical race theory. During the height of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, Jarnagin implied all police officers were violent.

She also stated that she was happy to “disrupt white nonsense,” and that she dreams of “throwing 90% of straight white men into the ocean.”

In Jarnagin’s Twitter bio, she states that she’s “dismantling white supremacy, misogyny and heteronormativity” and that she’s a “Latin teacher interested in proficiency, inclusion, and empathy.”

Tolly Salz, an English teacher and the chair of the English Department, has also signaled her support for ideas endemic to CRT. On Twitter, Salz promoted an article titled “White People’s Fear of Critical Race Theory is Based in Ignorance,” as well as one from Learning for Justice, a project of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, titled “Confronting the Weaponization of Whiteness in Our Classrooms,” which claims that white supremacy is “baked into America’s foundation.”

The article also condemned white womens’ emotions as instruments of oppression, making the claim that “Men going to war with armor is the same as white women waging war through tears.”

Salz also promoted a guide labeled “Teaching with the New York Time’s 1619 Project.”

Critical race theory also appears to have affected the Christian school’s religious leadership.

Antoni Luc-Tayengo, who recently became a chaplain at ESD, has publicly advocated for CRT. In an article titled “Predominantly White Churches & Racial Justice: Discern The Next Right Thing,” the female chaplain argues people should “look for color” and frames involvement in the openly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement as a moral imperative for Christians.

Her article also links to a “well-cultivated list of resources for anti-racism education of all ages.” The page includes the 1619 Project and work from critical race theorists Robin DiAngelo and Kimberle Crenshaw, among various others.

Rev. Nate Bostian is a senior chaplain at ESD. While his public remarks have not carried the same vitriolic tone of many others at the school, from his public remarks it’s clear that leftwing ideology influences his religious understanding. In this prayer he gave for LGBT pride month, Bostian begins by referring to God as the “God/god of Diversity and Inclusion.”

In another post, he cites infamous critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi before going on to provide a theological argument for diversity, inclusion, and equity.

ESD’s Institutional Ties To CRT

None of these examples are isolated incidents. Despite telling parents that they do not teach CRT or engage in shaming tactics against children on account of their race, ESD, as an institution, has done both. ESD sent parents a list of CRT information compiled by Elizabeth Goatley, the school’s director of diversity and inclusion. Parents were directed to a page called “Anti-Racism 102: Why Not All Discrimination Is ‘Racism.” Intended for children in grades K-4 and adorned with colorful cartoons, the page erroneously claims that white people cannot be the victims of racism, saying “reverse racism isn’t a thing. Stop trying to make reverse racism a thing.” It also claims everyone is complicit in systemic white supremacy and that “whiteness” must be “de-centered.”

The recommended reading list included Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” material from critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, Kendi’s “How To Be An Anti-Racist,” the 1619 Project, “Anti-racism for Kids 101,” and Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” among others. The list also linked to a “K-8 Racial Literacy” curriculum from an organization called Pollyanna. Pollyanna’s Conferences for School page sheds light on the type of material the organization presents to children.

Topics include “Race, Privilege, and Community Building,” “Shaping & Sustaining Safe Schools for LGBTQ+ Community,” “Intersectionality,” “Cultivating Racial Awareness and White Engagement,” and “Implicit Bias.” The organization also claims systemic racism “permeates every aspect of our society and transcends person-to person interactions,” a core belief of CRT.

The school’s DEI page explains that both staff and students frequently attend several conferences, including the People of Color Conference hosted by the leftwing National Association of Independent Schools. The POCC overtly teaches CRT. One presentation from the conference describes kindergarteners as “natural social justice warriors,” while others explicitly outline how to create a curriculum based on CRT.

Another presentation condemns the American system, telling the audience to “burn sh-t down.” It also discusses the “White People Way,” with the presenter condemning “perfectionism” and “power hoarding” as defining characteristics of white people.

The Federalist reached out to multiple school staff for comment, inquiring about the 1619 Project, racially charged statements made by a faculty member, and CRT in the classroom. The Federalist also asked why the school was present at the POCC event, where teachers were taught how to develop a curriculum grounded in CRT, if there was no intention of teaching the racially charged ideology.

In response, ESD’s Director of Communications Julie Clardy provided the following statement: “We present challenging material that asks students to consider multiple points of view. For instance, we present the 1619 and 1776 projects together and ask students to analyze and argue their merits. Students are edified, not damaged, when they are asked to examine ideas they may disagree with.”

ESD Is Not The Only School Deceiving Parents

The Episcopal School of Dallas is by no means the first academic institution to lie to parents about teaching critical race theory. Over the summer, President of the American Federation of Teachers union Randi Weingarten falsely claimed CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools despite her organization previously bragging on national television about teaching the ideology.

The Federalist reporting has revealed that officials at both Riverside School District and Los Angeles Unified School District lied to their school communities, falsely claiming they did not teach CRT. Despite the obvious parallels with previous instances, the state of the Episcopal School of Dallas demonstrates that elite private schools are not immune from the left’s push for CRT in America’s K-12 institutions.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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California School District Promotes White Privilege Conference and Being ‘Race Conscious’

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 19, 2022

Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.

The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”

Distortions Of Gender

The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.

One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”

The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.

Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”

Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference

The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”

The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”

Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.

The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.

The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”

‘Dismantle White Supremacy’

Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.

One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”

The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”

Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing “The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”

The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like “You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”

“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”

An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”

The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”

Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”

The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.

Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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California District Pays Nearly $170k For Curricula Teaching Children to Become Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’

Reported BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 12, 2022

California’s Jefferson Elementary School District will be the first district in the United States to implement ethnic studies courses in all of their elementary and middle schools, and their new curriculum for this includes teaching children to become leftwing “co-conspirators.” The district’s curriculum that brings new state requirements for high school into the earliest grade levels was created by Community Responsive Education, a leftwing organization run by critical race theorists at San Francisco State University.

The district, which is located in Daly City, California, and serves roughly 6,000 students across ten elementary schools and four middle schools, has agreed to pay the organization nearly $170k in taxpayer money.

Public Dollars to Make Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’

District documents note that the radical curriculum will be piloted in the 2021-2022 school year. It was presented by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor at San Francisco State University and the co-director of Community Responsive Education. The presentation was given during a school board meeting in July 2021 and began with a land acknowledgment that described the Ohlone people, not the United States, as the rightful stewards of the land that JESD is on.

Tintiangco-Cubales, who uses the pronouns “she/her” in addition to “siya,” a Filipino word that means both male and female, explained that she is “a settler, an uninvited visitor” on Ohlone land before going on to note that JESD is America’s first district that “is committed to rolling out Ethnic Studies in all of their middle and elementary schools.” In late 2021, California passed a state mandate that “ethnic studies” be taught in all public high schools.

The presentation explains that the curriculum is designed to “eliminate racism and other forms of oppression” by “creating, learning, listening, uncovering, and sharing of the his/herstories, experiences, and current conditions of those who have been racially marginalized, underrepresented, and/or silenced.”

The curriculum is divided into four different units, labeled “self,” “systems,” “social movements,” and “solidarity.” Each unit is accompanied by a corresponding set of “essential questions” and “enduring understandings.”

One such “enduring understanding” under the “self” unit reads: “Learning about our own identities and those of others allows us to become more empathetic and builds our capacity to go from being allies to co-conspirators/accomplices in the elimination of oppression.”

Teaching Kids America Is Inherently Evil

The second unit condemns America as institutionally racist and teaches children that white supremacy is entrenched in American systems such as education. The unit also indicts white people as the beneficiaries of racism, claiming that they use the system of white supremacy to maintain their “wealth, power, and privilege.” Additionally, students learn that “institutional racism is the way in which white supremacy continues to oppress non-white people.”

Children are then turned into ambassadors for critical race theory at the end of the unit when they are tasked with creating a public service announcement that “denounces systems that are oppressive,” which could, according to the curriculum, include American education systems if not America itself.

Directly after accusing America’s systems of being fundamentally racist and condemning white people as beneficiaries of racism who maintain white supremacy, teachers tell children how to mobilize and engage in “transformational resistance” in the third unit.

The unit focuses on social movements and blatantly aims to turn students into racially motivated leftist revolutionaries. Tintiangco-Cubales notes that special emphasis is placed on “the notion of transformational resistance.” Students are asked “How do we build social movements to create change and impact society?”

The final unit teaches children how they can “pursue true liberation” through an understanding of “solidarity, liberation, collective action, intersectionality, and dismantling systemic oppression.” Children are also taught that “To achieve true liberation, we must actively and collectively work together to dismantle various systems of oppression (ie: institutional racism, white supremacy, etc.).”

Making Children Into Political Agitators

Students’ transformations into leftist activists are completed with their “solidarity praxis project,” where students create a campaign to address a problem in their community. Even the presentation’s imagery leaves no doubt regarding the curriculum’s intent. Each unit is introduced by a cartoon-esque flat art character holding a protest sign.

District Pays Nearly $170k For CRT Courses

Tintiangco-Cubales presented the curriculum on behalf of Community Responsive Education, an organization that offers “professional and curriculum development services for community organizations and educational institutions to begin or sustain the journey of becoming community responsive.”

At a meeting in February 2020, the district agreed to pay Community Responsive Education $40,000 in taxpayer dollars to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the meeting’s public records.

Then in August 2020, Jefferson Elementary School District unanimously approved a motion to pay the organization $28,502 for “services during the 2020-21 school year to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the school board meeting’s minutes.

The district also voted to pay Community Responsive Education an additional $100,000 “for Ethnic Studies Curriculum and Teacher Development for both Middle and Elementary school teachers beginning on July 1, 2021 until June 30, 2023” for a total of $168,502.

The concept of “community-responsive education” from which the organization draws its name, just like “culturally responsive education,” is effectively a rebranding of critical race theory. The curriculum from Community Responsive Education is predicated on a belief that U.S. institutions are defined by racism and that collective action must be taken to dismantle them, a core tenet of critical race theory.

Furthermore, CRE, just like CRT, takes the traditional Marxist dichotomy that pits the oppressed proletariat against the oppressive middle class and reapplies it to race, thereby designating moral value, victimhood, and collective guilt on people as a result of immutable characteristics.

A Dangerous Model for Extremists In Education

As America’s first school district to implement ethnic studies curriculum in all of its elementary and middle schools, Jefferson Elementary School District could have significant influence on other ethnic studies curricula across California and America.

Without sacrificing any of the usual extremism inherent to CRT, this curriculum may mark a shift towards a more strategically oriented method of instruction. Rather than simply indoctrinating children with the beliefs of systemic racism, privilege, and oppression, this course is blatantly designed to create the next generation of extreme leftwing activists operating from these false premises.

This model will not be specific to Jefferson Elementary School District. In fact, a report from Parents Defending Education found that Community Responsive Education has a foothold in a variety of other school districts, including six others in California and one each in New York, Texas, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

A number of other California districts have also taken steps to indoctrinate children with CRT. One Bay Area school district promoted materials that told children to use witchcraft against people who say “all lives matter.” The Los Angeles Unified School District lied in claiming that CRT is not taught in its K-12 institutions despite hosting a critical race theorist who taught staff to “challenge whiteness” and inviting the director of UCLA’s Center for Critical Race Studies to give input on their ethnic studies curriculum.

This overt leftwing takeover of government schools has led some California parents to support a bipartisan campaign that would enshrine school choice and tether taxpayer dollars to students. Should it receive the required number of signatures and pass a vote, the initiative would allow parents to take their children — and their money — out of schools that prioritize indoctrination over education.

Neither school board President Clayton Koo nor Tintiangco-Cubales responded to requests for comment.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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Critical Race Trove From California District Tells Students How To Use Witchcraft On People Who Say ‘All Lives Matter’

Reported By Spencer Lindquist | DECEMBER 6, 2021

While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”

Colorblindness, Cops, and Curses

The page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the full range of CRT buzzwords, with links like Raising Race Conscious Children, the infamous 1619 Project, Anti-Racism for Beginners, and Social Identities and Systems of Oppression, among others. One link takes you to an “Anti-Racism Resource List,” which teaches about “white fragility” and claims that racism can only be perpetrated by white people. One of the “resources” provided was a Trevor Noah speech labeled “Why rioting makes sense,” followed by an unhinged anti-white rant from Sonya Renee Taylor, demanding that white people “throw your white body” on police officers and “put their bodies on the line for the purpose of justice.”

The list also addresses white people when it says, “We are socialized into white supremacy from the moment we are born” before going on to say, “It is about completely dismantling how you see yourself and how you see the world, so that you can dismantle … white supremacy.”

Samuel Martin graduated from CUHSD’s Branham High School in 2019 and was appalled by the district’s actions. He told The Federalist, “The idea that white students must ‘dismantle themselves’ in the context of their personality is cultish. Not only is it cultish, but it is deliberate in that this school system wants its’ white students to hate themselves. Do these people honestly think that drilling racial identitarianism into childrens’ heads from a young age is going to make them less racist?”

CUHSD also links to the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide, specifically their section labeled “high school,” which itself includes 45 different texts. Amid a wide variety of CRT inspired assignments is a document that includes writing prompts on police brutality and racist violence.

One section titled “Hex” tells the reader, “Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration.” It becomes increasingly deranged, suggesting that those who say, “all lives matter” or commit “microaggressions,” should be targeted. “Write your own hex poem, cursing that person,” it instructs.

When asked her thoughts on the document that instructed K-12 students to use witchcraft on political opponents, Branham teacher Meredith Allen told The Federalist she hasn’t read the documents her district recommends, so she “can’t comment,” but that she is generally “opposed to the ‘all lives matter’ message.”

Another section labeled “A World With No Police” cites police and military as “systems or institutions that … contribute to oppression.” It asks, “What would the world be like without them?” before telling the reader to write a poem discussing “a world without these institutions.”

“The Black Radical Tradition,” is a 565-page e-book that includes articles from the Communist League and Noel Ignatiev under the pen name Noel Ignatin. Ignatiev was a Marxist who argued that “abolishing the white race is … so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”

Then there’s a slide show entitled “What is the Black Lives Matter Movement?” which is made for children and was produced in part by teachers at LAUSD. It includes a glossary of terms like “white supremacy,” the definition of which includes the line, “systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”

The ADL’s linked document “George Floyd, Racism, and Law Enforcement” defines racism as “the … oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people,” a definition that reinforces the malicious lie that white people can’t be the victims of anti-white racism.

Another ADL resource condemns colorblindness and provides carefully crafted methods to indoctrinate white students with the idea that they have privilege without incurring backlash while a “Racial Equity Resource Guide” advertises the White Privilege Conference.

Top-Down Pushing Critical Race Theory On Students

The district’s equity resources page is just the most visible result of a series of steps in support of CRT that started long ago. In fact, the district was a testing ground for CRT before it spread throughout the nation. The book “Research Studies on Educating for Diversity and Social Justice” was published in 2018 and describes the process. An entire chapter, written in part by my former teacher, is dedicated to discussing how CRT was used at my high school so it could be replicated.

The book noted the use of the theory, saying, “CRT is used here to centralize the discussion of race and racism at Branham High School.” It went on to describe an “equity advisory” class that I was placed in as a sophomore, where “Students learn about the different types of oppression along with the privilege it affords the oppressors.” The authors hoped their tactics would spread, writing, “the intent behind sharing the process Branham underwent is to provide a model that could be followed by other schools across the nation.”

The district’s Board of Trustees supports this agenda, recently offering unanimous support for a resolution resolving to “dismantle institutionalized racism in our society and our school district” and is “committed to … implicit bias training, Ethnic Studies, and resources that foster dialogue around the guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter.”

Note the district’s adoption of the term “equity” rather than “equality.” Here’s superintendent Robert Bravo two hours and 39 minutes into a board meeting saying he believes “equity is about equity of outcomes.”

CUHSD even established an Anti-Racism Team, which is divided into eight Equity Teams that include teachers, principals, administrators, and even two students who must be “BIPOC.” That means white students are banned from the “Equity” Teams. They’re tasked with “challenging imbalances of power and privilege,” among other roles.

Michael Espinoza is a member of one such Equity Team and a teacher at Branham High School who won the district’s teacher of the year award. Here he is calling a Native American tribe the “rightful stewards of the lands our schools and district offices stand on” and telling teachers to recognize “the power of critical race theory and use it in our lesson plans.”

He also gave a speech to the class of 2021, where he levied leftwing complaints against America and quoted Huey Newton, imploring students to engage in revolution instead of “conforming to the machine that is the United States.” On his Instagram account, Espinoza celebrates mandates for ethnic studies classes and complains of living under “white supremacist, heteropatriarchal rule” in a plea to his “co-conspirators.”

If this is CUHSD’s model teacher, what does their model student look like? Espinoza’s students created a variety of leftwing posters in his ethnic literature class. One poster demanded “Dear White PPL: Start Listening, Stop Talking” and others that said, “Wear UR F-cking Mask” and “Give us back our land.” Principal Lawton took down the posters amid outcry before caving in and apologizing to the leftwing agitators.

Co-Conspirators? Or A Conservative Counter Culture?

The full ramifications of our education system’s descent into leftwing radicalism is yet to be fully realized, although we can be certain that many of the students it doesn’t lose to homeschooling will be successfully transformed into “co-conspirators.” But as the rhetoric of revolution becomes standard for stodgy school administrators, its appeal to youth might wane.

Conversely, they run the risk of creating a small but clever cadre of conservative youth who understand from firsthand childhood experiences the consequences of toxic racial grievance politics. Don’t be surprised if the propagandizers who intend to give permanency to left-wing hegemony instead give rise to a nascent conservative political force that will uproot it.

Update: After publication, CUHSD removed the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide. CUHSD’s original equity resources list can be viewed here.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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Education, Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – America Under Attack

A.F. BRANCO on October 28, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-america-under-attack/

With all the dangers facing America Biden and the Dems want you to feel threatened by Parents.

School Board Meetings — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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AG Merrick Garland Instructs FBI to Mobilize Against Parents Who Oppose Critical Race Theory, Covid Mandates in Public Schools

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published October 4, 2021

AG Merrick Garland

The Biden Regime is targeting political opponents and using the might of the federal government to abolish the First Amendment by classifying dissent as “domestic terrorism.”

US Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Covid mandates, citing ‘threats.’

Merrick Garland’s letter to the FBI follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” Curiously, Garland’s letter didn’t actually specify any credible threats.

“Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools, today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend. These sessions will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment and response by law enforcement.” the DOJ’s press release read.

The DOJ will be creating a task force “consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs, to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes…”

Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.

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Political

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Opinion: ‘Unmasking’ critical race theory

Commentary By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor| Friday, July 23, 2021

Last week I shared a quote from a very important column “How Adherents See ‘Critical Race Theory’” by William A. Galston, a former Clinton administration veteran (1993-95) who is currently a fellow with the Brookings Institution (a liberal “think tank”) and a weekly columnist with the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Land — (Photo: The Christian Post/Katherine T. Phan)

I know Galston and have participated on various panels with him in Washington, D.C. I like Bill. He is liberal but he’s honest and a “straight-shooter” as we would say in Texas. That common sense, patriotic streak may be attributable to his having served a four-year stint in the United States Marine Corps when he was a young man.

In that July 14th column, Galston concludes with the following observation: “But, one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence – the founding document of the American liberal order – is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment, tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.”

It took the courage of a Marine to write that column in the face of a withering propaganda barrage in favor of critical race theory in the progressive media. After this week’s column, “A Deeper Look at Critical Race Theory,” it would be wise for Bill to employ a food taster at Capitol Hill receptions and D.C. dinner parties. Why? It is quite simple – he has told the truth to the progressive elites, and they often react viscerally and violently to such effrontery.

Galston “unmasks” CRT as a mortal threat to the American constitutional and judicial system and he does so in no uncertain terms.

Having dived into the original sources, Galston reports several devastating facts about CRT.

First, “Critical Race Theory denies the possibility of objectivity.”
Second, CRT makes “race the center of our focus,” which is in direct opposition to Dr. King’s focus and vision. As such, CRT harshly critiques the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s as making only “symbolic” and “token” solutions for systemic racism.
Third, Galston notes that CRT “is an explicitly left-wing movement inspired by the thinking of an Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci.”
Fourth, CRT’s founders “identified with Black Power movements much more than with those who were working for integration.”
Lastly, CRT “rejects the principle of equality of opportunity” and asserts that the real goal must be “equality of results,” measured by the “black share of income, wealth and social standing.” CRT rejects policies such as affirmative action as mere “diversions” meant “to make the mythology of equal opportunity plausible.”

Galston concludes his exposé and critique by quoting Ibram X. Kendi, the author of the best-seller, How to Be an Anti-Racist, where he asserts that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” This would condemn America to a perpetually racist future in perpetuity.

Bill Galston has committed the unpardonable progressive sin. He has told the plain, unvarnished, democracy-destroying truth about CRT. The counter-culture lynch mob will be out in force in full-throated rage.

We need more Americans and especially more progressives to display this kind of extraordinary courage and intellectual honesty.

I hope you will join me in applauding Bill Galston’s courage, and his intellectual honesty. Please also join me in praying for him in the days ahead, because the proto-fascists and black shirts masquerading as progressives will be out to destroy him.

Dr. Richard Land, BA (magna cum laude), Princeton; D.Phil. Oxford; and Th.M., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, was president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) and has served since 2013 as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Land has been teaching, writing, and speaking on moral and ethical issues for the last half century in addition to pastoring several churches. He is the author of The Divided States of America, Imagine! A God Blessed America, Real Homeland Security, For Faith & Family and Send a Message to Mickey.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: What’s Dumber Than CRT? CNN

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jul 21, 2021

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org..

What's Dumber Than CRT? CNN

Source: AP Photo/Ron Harris

As we discussed last week, “critical race theory” is a subtle philosophical construct where the answer to everything is: THAT’S RACIST! Teachers hawking this glop are being defended by their journalist allies, who sneer that CRT critics are too stupid to understand the nuances of the theory. The Aristotelian ideal of this sneer was Elle Reeve‘s “special report” for CNN — pre-taped to eliminate any danger of Elle being contradicted by someone smarter, such as a 10-year-old.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar introduced the segment by asking her: “Do these vocal opponents of critical race theory actually understand fully what it is?”

(That’s what’s known as a “rhetorical question,” kids!)

Elle: “No.” [Bored] “And why should they? It’s an academic theory taught mostly at the grad student level. But what they think it means is teaching white kids that all white people are bad and racist. And so, of course they’re afraid of that.”

They’re afraid!!! Wait — remind me: Who’s banning books, again? Who’s flipping out about “microaggressions”? Who’s demanding that Big Tech censor people? Who’s demanding “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” from speech they don’t like?

Parents aren’t “afraid”; they’re incensed. They’re paying the salaries of people who spend all day telling their kids that America is racist. (Elle didn’t give that explanation. Perhaps it frightens her.)

The “vocal opponents” of CRT who “don’t actually understand fully what it is” seem to be mostly billionaire investment bankers — at least judging by the articles in the Daily Mail. Elle’s conclusion: A “theory” that consists of going around shouting “RACISM!” is too complex for those guys to understand.

The format of Elle’s pre-taped report consisted of her interviewing opponents of CRT … then nailing them with her brilliant comebacks! Except even with CNN doing the editing, the CRT opponents sounded perfectly reasonable, while Elle’s comebacks kept revealing her yawning stupidity.

Early in Elle’s report, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is shown saying, “Critical race theory says America’s fundamentally racist.” What a dope!

About 60 seconds later, Elle deferentially asks a hijab-wearing high school teacher to explain CRT. The teacher exclaims: “Race and racism is literally the building blocks of this country!” (Were I the editor of Elle’s piece, I think I would have cut that part of her answer.)

Next, Elle talks to a parent fighting CRT, who says: “Don’t force on our kids a particular worldview. Taking a wide brush and painting this country as structurally racist, it’s insane … it’s a lie.”

To this, Elle patronizingly informs the parent that America’s racism “isn’t distant history.” Her evidence of contemporary racism? “In the ’90s, the crime bill gave much more severe sentencing to crack cocaine versus powder cocaine simply because black people were perceived as doing crack cocaine and white people weren’t …”

HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS? The reason crack penalties were so severe is because the Congressional Black Caucus demanded it. (And as long as I’m correcting Elle’s false facts, the crack penalties were passed in 1986 and 1988, not “in the 1990s.”)

Black churches, black leaders and black members of Congress were enraged by what the crack epidemic was doing to their neighborhoods. A 1986 New York Times article reported on “all-night vigils” held by the leaders of 60 black churches, who called the crack epidemic “a new form of genocide.” Urban League President John Jacob railed against communities “held hostage by crack dealers,” saying “drugs kill more blacks than the (Ku Klux) Klan ever did.” Running for president in 1988, Jesse Jackson spoke of the scourge of crack cocaine and told a cheering crowd, “When I become president, the drug pusher is in trouble.”

White supremacists — right, Elle?

This has been patiently explained roughly 1 million times. But why bother knowing stuff when smug arrogance is good enough for CNN?

Elle’s next big “gotcha” was even more embarrassing, if that is possible. She rolled out the old chestnut about blacks being considered “three-fifths” of a human being in our Constitution. Yes, she really did that.

Here’s her exchange with a college Republican:

COLLEGE REPUBLICAN: To paint the country as an inherently racist country from its founding I think is dangerous.

REEVE: The three-fifths compromise is written into the Constitution in which slaves are counted as three-fifths of a person.

SCORE!

How can you be in journalism and have no idea what the three-fifths clause means? No research is involved, Elle! Just read it.

The three-fifths clause means exactly the opposite of what Elle thinks it means. This was not a general statement on the slaves’ humanity: It was about congressional apportionment. The slave states wanted to count slaves as full “persons” in order to increase the number of their representatives in Congress.

If you adored slavery, you’d want the Constitution to count each slave as a full person — as 20 people! The slaves still couldn’t vote, but their slave masters would get more votes in Congress. It’s the same idea behind California’s demand that illegal aliens be counted when determining that state’s congressional apportionment.

I can’t even believe there’s anyone in America who needed that explained again. (Next time, I’ll just say: Get a home-schooler to explain it to you, Elle.)

It must have been embarrassing for everyone at CNN to watch this bimbo misstating well-known facts in a network “special report” that was supposed to show what cretins CRT critics are.

So how did the CNN hosts react? They were gobsmacked by the genius of Elle’s report!

JOHN BERMAN: That was so great.

KEILAR: Right?

BERMAN: I mean, that was just so great, and just the way the questions are asked. Just by asking simple questions you revealed so much. I mean, that was just fantastic.

ELLE: Thank you.

My idea of hell is being condescended to by an idiot, forever and ever, with no respite. In other words, watching CNN.

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Opinion, Political

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Destructing America

A.F. BRANCO on July 5, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-destructing-america/

Biden’s radical leftist policies are destroying America.

Biden Destruction Of America — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – A Slimy Creature

A.F. BRANCO on July 6, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-a-slimy-creature/

How about we change the Democrat mascot to a hippopotamus type animal and call it “Hypocrat”.

Democrats are Hypocrats — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.

A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Critical race theory provides answers very different from what Christianity offers

Reported By John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett, Voices Contributors | Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Francis Schaeffer described how ideas escape the ivory towers of universities and think tanks eventually to shape how ordinary people think, speak, and view their world. In 2020, one idea made that journey in record time. Not that long ago, conversations involving Critical Race Theory were largely relegated to academic papers, classroom discussions, and scholarly journal articles. Today, dialogues about CRT can be found across social media, in corporate boardrooms, and even in the Church.

As a theory, CRT descends from European and North American philosophical traditions, particularly Marxism and Postmodernism. Like these worldviews of its intellectual ancestry, CRT sees the world in terms of power dynamics. In this way of thinking, social evils such as poverty, crime, or oppression result not from universal human frailties but from Euro-Americans intent on securing and increasing their economic and social power. Based on this metanarrative, equality and justice demand privileging the stories of those kept out of power. CRT sees members of the oppressed group as morally right, and members of the oppressor group as morally wrong.

CRT, like any worldview framework, should be evaluated. That, however, is easier said than done, even in the Church. Advocates often point to common ground between Critical Race Theory and the Christian worldview (for example, the commitment to justice and human dignity), and label any critiques of CRT as convenient ways to avoid confronting injustice and racism (which may not be true, but often is).

Many Christian critics, myself included, are specifically concerned with how CRT conflicts with a Christian worldview, particularly in areas of identity and morality. Not everyone agrees. Recently on Twitter, a defender of CRT boldly tweeted, “Whoever told you CRT is a worldview was either lying to you or didn’t know what they were talking about.” Of course, assuming malice or greed is a way of dodging the question rather than making an argument.

Another Twitterer offered a different response, “If CRT is bad because it’s a ‘secular worldview’ and we must only derive our worldviews ‘biblically’ then I better not see a TRACE of Aristotle or Plato in your worldview either, brother.” This one is a slightly more clever way of missing the point or, specifically misunderstanding what it means for a worldview to be “biblical.” To have a Christian worldview is to hold views that are consistent with the Bible, not to only have views that are in the Bible. The problem with Critical Race Theory is not that it isn’t found in the Bible; it’s that it offers a very different explanation of humanity, sin, and redemption than the Bible does.

Like the postmodernism that birthed it, Critical Race Theory can be considered a worldview. It does more than just offer a handful of specific ideas about race and society; CRT offers a complete framework of beliefs, a universalizing story of the world. CRT describes who we are, what’s wrong with the world, and prescribes how to fix it and what “better” would be. In other words, like Christianity, CRT answers the basic questions any worldview does. Except, the answers CRT provides are very different than those Christianity offers, even if both worldviews recognize the world is broken by evils such as racism and injustice.

Critical Race Theory has critical errors. By simplistically reducing evil to power dynamics and external social realities, CRT denies moral agency and the redemptive potential of entire groups of people because of their racial identity.

At the same time, those who oppose Critical Theory must do more than simply write off all its concerns. Like Marxism, Critical Theory is something of a Christian heresy, taking the Christian themes of human dignity and justice and a world remade, and re-orienting these causes under new management. Most pertinently, CRT is slipping into the space where the Church belongs but is too often absent.

If we don’t want unbiblical explanations of life and justice sweeping through the Church or culture, we’d better make sure we communicate and embrace the full ramifications of Christian truth for society, and then act justly and love mercy. If we rob our Faith of its social implications, we are no longer talking about Christianity. Such a personalized, privatized moral system may make us feel better, but it will never stand up to the rival worldviews of our day.

Over the next four Tuesday nights, The Colson Center is hosting an online course taught by Dr. Thaddeus Williams, on his book, Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth. This is the book I’ve been waiting for, the book that carefully and biblically walks through a Christian view of justice. Dr. Williams carefully explains not only why theories like CRT aren’t true, but what the Bible asks of Christ’s followers when it comes to justice. Space is limited. Register today at breakpoint.org/Williams.

Because, the best antidote for the failings of Critical Theory and its inadequate worldview is for the Church to understand and live consistently with the Bible.

Originally posted at breakpoint.org

From BreakPoint. Reprinted with the permission of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. “BreakPoint®” and “The Colson Center for Christian Worldview®” are registered trademarks of The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Stonestreet is the President of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and co-host with Eric Metaxas of Breakpoint, the Christian worldview radio program founded by the late Chuck Colson. He is co-author of A Practical Guide to Culture, A Student’s Guide to Culture and Restoring All Things.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘CRT’

BY: RYAN MACPHERSON | JANUARY 10, 2023

Ryan C. MacPherson, Ph.D., is a Minnesotan and author of “Rediscovering the American Republic: A People’s Quest for Ordered Liberty.”

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BY: CASEY CHALK | SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

The New Model Policies

A Personal Anecdote

Protecting Our Children

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REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Institutional Suicide

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A.F Branco Cartoon – Deplorable

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REPORTED BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | APRIL 25, 2022

Class and Culture Wars Merge

Dems Are Fanatical Culture Warriors

Cushioned from Consequences

The Wicked Working Class

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Reported by PHIL SHIVER | February 22, 2022

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fowl Play

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Reported BY: RICH CROMWELL | FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.

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REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | FEBRUARY 02, 2022

Decentering Whiteness

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REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 27, 2022

CRT In The Classroom

Faculty Members Endorse CRT

ESD’s Institutional Ties To CRT

ESD Is Not The Only School Deceiving Parents

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REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 19, 2022

Distortions Of Gender

Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference

‘Dismantle White Supremacy’

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Reported BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 12, 2022

Public Dollars to Make Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’

Teaching Kids America Is Inherently Evil

Making Children Into Political Agitators

District Pays Nearly $170k For CRT Courses

A Dangerous Model for Extremists In Education

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Reported By Spencer Lindquist | DECEMBER 6, 2021

Colorblindness, Cops, and Curses

Top-Down Pushing Critical Race Theory On Students

Co-Conspirators? Or A Conservative Counter Culture?

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – America Under Attack

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Reported By Cristina Laila | Published October 4, 2021

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Commentary By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor| Friday, July 23, 2021

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Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Jul 21, 2021